Karl Marx, Failed Social Visionary
Posted on:
18
Feb
2012
by James Farmer
Born 1818 in Trier, Germany. Died 1883 in London
Fear not, you can now bluff it with the best of them, thanks to IFA Magazine’s monthly crib-sheet on all the great theorists.
Capitalism’s ultimate bogeyman wasn’t wrong about everything. His theoretical analysis of the emerging capitalist economy was both brilliant and correct in many ways, and it is still taught in business schools. But Marx was of course looking through the ‘wrong’ end of the telescope, in that as his focus was on social liberation rather than on business realities. And his readiness to demand violent unrest was always unhelpful. Still, knowing your enemy is never a bad thing.
Marx was a failed law student who preferred boozing to books, although he later turned to journalism and philosophy with more success. He could never have afforded the luxury of his writing if it hadn’t been for the wealth of his industrialist friend Friedrich Engels, the heir to some of the filthiest cotton mills in Europe, who had rebelled against his family’s ethos. The two travelled widely across Western Europe’s war-torn hotspots before Engels eventually went back to running a Manchester mill.
The big idea Marx’s great historic insight was that capitalism had turned people quite literally into ‘human resources’ whose importance was measured solely in terms of their economic value. Even he couldn’t deny that this brutal ‘alienated’ structure worked brilliantly when it came to creating value for their employers. But he was equally sure that the competitive nature of capitalism would become steadily more brutal, ending with the total dominance of giant monopolies which would swallow up everybody else.
Before long, Marx declared, capitalism would implode completely as the super-monopolies tried to devour each other. And in 1848, as a wave of attempted revolutions shook France, Germany, Italy and Austria, he declared rather rashly that capitalism’s hour had finally struck and that it was now time for the masses to seize their historic chance with violent revolution.
The big mistake What would happen next? The proletariat would create a new economic model, he said, in which it would permanently own the entire means of production. The profit principle would be abolished, and the landowners would be dispossessed, or worse
Marx was, of course, wrong. The 1848 dissent was soon quashed, and the hated monopolists invented anti-competitive cartels which somewhat blunted their urge to destroy each other. Ultimately, the 1848 Paris rebellion did nothing except soften up the city to not one but two Prussian invasions.
Nearly forgotten by history Having missed his moment in 1848, Marx retreated to London in 1849, where he lived quietly, writing books until his death in 1883. And there it might all have ended, had Lenin’s Bolsheviks not eventually staged their 1917 attempt to turn Marx’s mainly theoretical economic ideas into a fully functioning communist Russian state – with consequences that need no further explanation.
Constant change is here to stay As an early fan of the philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, Marx believed that all change, for better or worse, derived from endless conflict. The repeated clash between one idea (thesis) and its opposite (antithesis), resulting each time in synthesis, was the core of his historical idea of dialectics and the main rationale for his revolutionary social urgings. It all sounds less frightening if you call it “creative destruction”, an artsy-sounding buzzword which means much the same thing. Funny, that.
Tags: marx
